One word defines what Zope is all about: DELEGATION. If you work alone or your project is so rocket-science that it requires a team made 100% of highly skilled programmers, then it may be better for you to use plain Python and Zope parts (like ZODB and ZPublihser), Quixote, WebWare or your own framework. Most projects in the real world are not like this. Most sites must be managed and updated by users of varying skills. Corporate sites, intranets, content portals must be built with tools that allow easy and safe delegation of management powers to many people, from journalists and salespeople to web designers with little programming skills. If you can't delegate, you get backlogs, tech staff burn-out, frustrated users and unhappy customers. An interesting point: in another "Why not Zope" piece, Chuck Esterbrook says he prefers a syntax like the ASP and PHP <%%> tags than DTML. We believe DTML is actually a strong selling point of Zope. Combined with Python Scripts and SQL Methods, DTML encourages separation of layout and logic much better than ASP and PHP. To define dynamic templates, dtml-var, dtml-in and the occasional dtml-if are enough. With proper support of Python Scripts, complex DTML expressions can be avoided, making DTML very easy to read and modify by anyone who knows HTML. And ZPT can be even easier. In ASP and PHP it is very common to see SQL and HTML fragments embedded in the <%%> parts, which means that DBAs, programmers and designers all have to touch the same code to make changes. If your site is so small that one person has all three roles, then maybe you can be more productive hacking away SQL, HTML, PHP and client-side JavaScript all in the same document. But if your site is that small, you really don't need a content management system like Zope. In medium to large sites, there are never enough all-knowing sysadmin/perl-hacker/dba/web-designer old-style "web masters" to go around... So Andrew Kuchling's and Chuck Esterbrook's texts should really be called "Why Zope is not for me?" instead of just "Why not Zope?". Best regards, Luciano